Hi BIOS! My Name Is “Linux”, Or Is It?

Posted by Sander_Marechal on Aug 4, 2008 7:09 AM EDT
My Technophilic Musings		Mail this story
Print this story

A couple of days ago, I read this on Matthew Garrette’s blog, where he tells us about a vendor’s BIOS trying to figure out the OS type/version and setting things around on deciding the OS it is running. The call in question was _OSI(“Linux”). He goes on to say that the action the firmware takes, on finding out if the OS is linux, was probably inaccurate and it was good that linux kernel DOES NOT identify itself as “Linux” and returns false for the _OSI(“Linux”) and instead returns true when probed for Windows. That got me thinking, the first thought being that isn’t this a BIG flaw in the kernel. But “Never make judgements straightaway”, I have learnt in the past. So, thought about reading it a bit more. After some googling around, I came to know the sound reasoning behind the decision.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Editorial; Groups: Kernel, Linux, Microsoft

« Return to the newswire homepage

Subject Topic Starter Replies Views Last Post
There's a PDF that can be accessed from this article tracyanne 4 1,532 Aug 4, 2008 3:56 PM

You cannot post until you login.